Have you ever wondered how hard it is to sculpt a perfect ice mammoth in Tibia? How many ice cubes are usually needed to do it? How much you would have to spend on ice cubes? And how much the perfect sculpture should be worth? This article will have all the answers.

When Ice sculpting was introduced to Tibia it wasn't very popular. Players often didn't bother to use an obsidian knife on the ice cube after looting it, they would just leave it inside the creatures body. The situation has changed drastically after the update in which an achievement feature was implemented into Tibia. This change motivated many players to unlock all of the possible achievements and one of the secret achievement is to sculpt a perfect ice mammoth. Due to the higher demand of ice cubes, their price went up. Now it is rare to see an ice cube lying on the floor. The higher interest in ice sculpting convinced us to speed up our research in order to share with you what we had already researched.

Research

Did you know that this research was one of the first for tibia-stats to start?
That means it took us almost 2 years to finish it!

What did we do during this time? First we wanted to check if ice cubes dropped by different creatures differ in quality (the chance to get to the next sculpting stage the same way certain rusty armors turn to different armors based on the creature that drops them). To do this, we gathered ice sculpting results individually for each different creature. Based on the data which we got and on the fact that the ice cubes have the same item id (which can be checked when its set to hotkey) we could rebut the hypothesis stating that "the ice cubes differs from themselves depending on the creature from which it has been looted". Knowing this, we were one step closer to finishing our research. The way to the finish line was still long - gaining the ice cubes was time consuming. During almost one and a half years, we managed to get data from only 7000~ ice cubes, which was not enough to get the proper values.

To speed things up, two of our researchers (Gorak and Trishula) created the lotteries where the "payment" for tickets was ice cubes (using the occasion we would like to say "thank you" to all players who participated in these lotteries!), that lotteries gave us additional 5500~ ice cubes for tests (most of them came from Elon Arrowhead - 4800 ice cubes!). Below you can see the movie made by Trishula presenting the results of carving ice cubes from his lottery.

Even the data from such a high amount of ice cubes wasn't enough to suspect what the real chance of getting a perfect ice mammoth is. The last test server was very useful in helping. During it we were able to get as many ice cubes for testing as we wanted from test server assistants. Thanks to that we were able to do thousands upon thousands of ice sculpting attempts!. The results which we got from the test server gave us enough data to finish the research.

Results

At the end, we have done research on 22,197 ice cubes. Since some of them made it to the next rounds, the total number of obsidian knife usages was 30,488. Considering that each attempt took 1 second, sculpting all the ice cubes took us more than 8 hours 28 minutes and 8 seconds of pure sculpting (1 attempt per 1 sec).

So what did we find out?

The most interesting observation is that, after each sculpting attempt the chance that the ice cube will not break decreases.

For first cut the rounded chance of success is: 31%
For 2nd cut this chance is: 19% (rounded)
For 3rd cut: 10% (rounded)
And for final cut: 7% (rounded)

>>> This means that overall chance to get perfect ice mammoth is 0,000405 (1 to 2466). (which is worked out to be 1 in 2500)

>>> If we multiply this result by the price of one ice cube (100-250 gp) we will get an average cost of gaining an ice mammoth which will be around 247k - 616k gp.

>>> Considering that you will have all the ice cubes gathered, and everything set for sculpturing you would have to spend in average 41 minutes 6 seconds to carve the perfect mammoth.

Of course this data is based on the ideal model. As you probably know statistics only help to describe the reality. Someone lucky may get the mammoth after his/her first attempt and someone else may use 100000 cubes and be so unlucky to not get it, but the highest chance is that you will get it after carving around 2466 cubes, and there is really small chance that you would not get it after carving 5000 cubes.

Conclusion

We hope that our research has answered some of your questions. As you can see ice sculpting is not as easy as it may seem to be. It requires a lot of patience, luck and time/money - to loot/buy needed cubes.